Observation of individual thinking - an impossibility? Interview assessment in empirical music education research: A systems-theoretical approach

Abstract

Recently music educationists have paid a great deal of attention in their empirical research to music teachers` individual ways of thinking and their subjective experience. Why do teachers act in specific ways, how do they think and which points do they take into consideration concerning a particular topic? Interviewing them is the way to answer these questions, as a person`s motivation and thoughts can only be found out about in direct conversation. However, what is the actual meaning of the interviewees` answers? Do they in fact reflect the interviewees` way of thinking? Or do they merely describe specific situations and can therefore not be used as a general reference? So the question to deal with when assessing interviews is to what extent interview answers in fact represent the interviewees` way of thinking, or whether interviews merely give empirical researchers a pretense of being close to reality (Nassehi, Saake 2002, p. 68).

The author views the practice of interview assessment within the field of music education from a new angle, applying Niklas Luhmann`s systems theory and Armin Nassehi`s systems-theory-related hermeneutics. She deals with the questions of what can be found out by qualitative assessment of interview transcripts and which consequences the result has for empirical interview-based research in the field of music education. For this purpose, the author (1.) describes several assumptions and concepts of Niklas Luhmann`s systems theory, (2.) illustrates how they affect the assessment of interview data, using Armin Nassehi`s systems-theory-related hermeneutics and (3.) discusses the contingency of observations using methodological remarks from the field of biography research. The result is that solely communication itself (which is a self-referential process) can be observed, and that interview texts neither represent the individuals they come from nor can the interviewees be identified according to what they said in any way. Only the persons constituted by the very text can be observed and are therefore relevant to music-educational research. How this affects scientific research and what it does to the results is discussed subsequently (4.). Finally (5.) the author outlines the next steps of her research project.